Dlangamandla in the sources
Dlangamandla is the royal salutation of the amaTolo, a Lala clan descended from Tolo, the twin of Zizi. Both Bryant and Soga say the word, “he who eats mightily”, comes from the contest between the twin brothers.
What the sources say
Bryant. The amaTolo’s great ancestor, Bryant writes, was “one Dlangamandla (He-who-eats-mightily)”; the clan became famous as rain-doctors, and he connects the name Tolo with the Drakensberg Bushmen’s use of the word for any “Coastal Nguni” (p. 358). His clan table lists Dlangamandla as the clan-name against emaTolweni.
Soga. He says that while the royal salutation of the amaZizi is Dlamini, “that of the Ama-Tolo, doubtless commemorating this contest, is Dlangamandla (‘eat vigorously’)”, and that the twin brothers Tolo and Zizi quarrelled and finally separated after their father Kuze favoured the younger (p. 426). Of the later amaTolo he writes that minor branches left Gcalekaland at the time of the so-called “emancipation” of the Fingoes and settled at Peddie, and that the royal salutation is Dlangamandla (p. 435).
Relation to the Zizi. Soga places the Tolo genealogy with the Zizi table.
Cautions
Our own planning list files Dlangamandla under the Swati. The two sources we read treat it as a Lala (amaTolo) address-name instead, found in Zululand, Natal and the Eastern Cape; we cannot tell whether there is also a Swati family of that name. Bryant was a Catholic missionary who collected clan traditions in the early twentieth century; he writes in a jocular colonial style, dates early generations by a rule of eighteen years to a reign, and often says he is guessing. We give his statements as his. Soga was a Xhosa-born mission doctor and historian who wrote in 1930 from informants and older colonial histories; his tables are partly garbled in the machine-read text.
Izithakazelo and totem
The word itself is the royal salutation recorded by Bryant and Soga. For your own family’s fuller praises, we would like to record them, credited to you.
Sources and further reading
- A. T. Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (London: Longmans, 1929); read in the Internet Archive text, including its alphabetical table of clan names and address-names near the end (machine-read, with garbled columns)
- J. H. Soga, The South-Eastern Bantu (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1930); Internet Archive text
Do you belong to the Dlangamandla? Tell us your izithakazelo and what elders say about the family’s history, and we will add it, credited to you. Share what you know or WhatsApp 065 138 8213.